fuckyeahdnd:fitzrove:calligrafiti:fidoruh:a-book-of-creatures:allthingslinguistic:There’s a theory t
fuckyeahdnd:fitzrove:calligrafiti:fidoruh:a-book-of-creatures:allthingslinguistic:There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumberEnglish has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.Mx. Leah Velleman on twitterIcelandic folklore requires you avoid saying the names of evil whales, otherwise you’ll draw their attention.Yall have evil whales? Yeah, Eric the White Beaked Whale’s a right bastard. This is the logic behind the etymology for the most common Finnish word for bear, ‘karhu’. That word refers to the animal’s coarse fur!Other euphemisms include honey-paw (mesikämmen), one-with-a-large-forehead (otso; also a common male first name), the apple/king of the forest, and a lot of archaic words idk how to translate (kontio, kouvo [only visible in place names like the city of Kouvola] and ohto). The suspected original word, oksi, is never used nowadays outside of folklore studies and linguistics.Hell yeah more secret Finnish bear names (I literally did not know that otso and otsa were related) -- source link